Murmur. Will Eaves
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It is effective, but in a way that doesn’t have effects.
*
I liked the Fun Fair and Festival Pleasure Gardens, but I love the old fairs more.
At the Festival there were approved attractions – the tree walk, the water chute, the grand vista, the Guinness Clock, and a marvellously eccentric children’s railway, designed by the Punch cartoonist, Mr Emett. This last innovation had a locomotive called Nellie, with an engine sandwiched between a pavilioned passenger car and, to the rear, a copper boiler surrounded by a wonky fence. Britain on the move! A weather vane sat on top of the boiler, and a whistle in the shape of a jug. Everything seemed thin and elegant, a series of wiry protrusions, like an undergraduate. The whistle itself adorned a chopped-off lamp-post and a dovecote. It presented an unconscious picture of bomb damage and higgledy-piggledy reconstruction.
Oh, but it was lifeless! In the Hall of Mirrors, for example, I noticed an absence of the laughter one encounters on the seasonal fairground or in Blackpool or Brighton, on the Pier. Instead one had the sense that, in looking at themselves all bent out of shape, people were being reminded of what was not quite right about their day out as whole, which was that the jollity felt forced, and polished up, and that the element of lawlessness that is so necessary to a carnival was missing.
As it happened, just up the road, Brooker’s fair had come to the Common, as it does every year, and that was a proper raffish fair of the old type, with stalls and toffee apples, and fish for prizes, and overcoated old ladies in the payboxes of the dodgems (and the gallopers and the chairoplanes) keeping an eye on the hordes, and gaff lads riding the Waltzers, and duckboards underfoot (the Common has marshy spots), and caravans, and lights everywhere, and yes, the fighting booth, with a few rather tragical looking curiosities no longer called freaks but ‘Wonders of the World’. In fifty years’ time, you will have my machine in a booth, of course; or better yet my test, and instead of the sign outside the booth saying ‘Are you a Man or a Mouse?’, it will say: ‘Are you a Man or a Machine?’ (And the answer will be: both.)
It is an erotic place, the fair. Everything about it – the mushrooming appearance, the concentration of energy, the scapegrace hilarity, the ambush and occupation of common land, the figures moving in the trees after the covers go on and the lights are out – bespeaks the mortal. This is your chance, it says. Take it!
He was wearing a very threadbare black suit, with a grubby white shirt.
The girls, away from their concerned mothers, were hanging about the novelty rides with the flashier gaffers, the ones with studded belts and rings on their fingers and satin cuffs on their shirtsleeves – the ones with sideburns and cowboy swagger. They are not handsome, these lads, and they’re filthy dirty from all the putting up of rides and maintenance, but their attraction – to the girls – is their daring, the way they leap about the tracks, hitching rides on cars and leaping off again, and of course the fact that they do not have to be introduced to anyone.
But I preferred Cyril, who was dressed, as I say, in a suit, who seemed shy, and said ‘thank you, sir’ in a soft deep voice when I handed over my money. He didn’t quite belong with the other gaffers, which meant he was a new hire and not formerly known to the Brookers. And he had a moment’s uncertainty – I caught his eye – when he counted out the change and saw that I knew what he was doing.
The double-spin – the spin within a spin – of the Waltzers prompted me to think about the n-body problem and waves of chemical concentration in a ring of cells, so I was happy to pay for another ride. Well, that wasn’t the only reason. This time he gave me the right change and a smile. I took a risk and said: ‘I’d like to know how that is done.’ ‘How what is?’, he replied, frowning, and moved on to the next car. But I waved when I got off and his grin was a flash of mixed emotions.
I gave him lunch, which he wolfed down, and we talked. I don’t think I expected him to respond to my weekend offer. Asking for things entails a loss of esteem, but he didn’t absolutely say no and so I concluded he had been embarrassed rather than put off, and I went back a few days later and loitered.
Though these assignations do not last long, the moment invariably spreads out.
The first thing he did when we met in the trees, in a small bower of hawthorn, was to pick a spiny twig out of the way and thread it safely behind a larger branch moving in another direction. That meant he could then lay his head on my lapel and put his hands on my arms, as if he were bracing himself for something. The tender contract signed, we went about our business very efficiently – Cyril eagerly taking the woman’s role, as men least willing to admit their taste mostly do – and the mood changed. The reward for competence is suspicion and, between men, a ruthless brio designed to break the bonds of troublesome affection. Luckily, I am not jealous. ‘I want some more,’ Cyril whispered to me. ‘You can watch if you like.’ So I did. He slipped from our shelter into the main clearing and soon found his way, turning jauntily as he walked – almost skipped – to another tree-fringed island where a group of men from the caravans took turns with him. One of them stuffed a handkerchief in his mouth. Cyril turned his head, all eyes, mouth filled up with dots, to look at me while this was going on, to see if I was still there, to see if I was shocked. I was fascinated, of course, and pleased he was enjoying himself, but concerned in a different way. His legs looked thin and white and unfinished with the trousers dropped about his shoes, like the bones of a more robust ancestor.
When the men were done, I went over and asked Cyril if he would like a bed for the night, and he was polite and gentle again, and said yes, that would be lovely. We listened to the radio, as I have said. He told me several of the riding-masters went with lads and that it was one of the perks of the life. He said that there is usually one who becomes the ‘dolly tub’, a term Cyril did not like, and that sometimes it was very good and others it was too rough and a worry. He would not admit to prostitution and so I made the mistake with the money, which is perhaps why he stole from me. I think being a gaff was a source of pride.
These are, or were, the contributing circumstances. I view them unsentimentally. It is interesting that I do not consider their rehearsal to be a serious kind of thought. Underneath them run echoes and rills of a different order, however, the inner murmur, and these I take to be true thinking, determinate but concealed.
In the middle of the night, with his back to me, and his skin warm, he explained how the short-changing or ‘tapping’ was, after all, supposed to be done.
‘The rich flat’ – flats or flatties are trade, the punters – ‘the rich flat hands me the money, say a ten-bob note for a half-shilling ride, and I take it to Queenie in the paybox. There’s no fooling Queenie, because she can tell who’s on the ride, how many, how much should be coming in, so I can’t diddle her.’ He paused to cough, and I felt his ribs. ‘Not so hard!’ He settled his head back into the pillow. ‘So I collect the change, florins, bobs and sixpences, and go back to the customer, and I count it out from my left hand to my right so he can see it’s right: “Two, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, nine-and-six, and the ride makes ten.” Now it’s all in my right hand, in the palm, but as I tip the coins into the flat’s hand, I squeeze my palm, like, to keep hold of a few coins. The ride is running up by this point, so the customer doesn’t notice what has happened.’ He swallowed. ‘Or he shouldn’t. It takes a bit of practice. Takes a bit of nerve. I saw you and thought, this one won’t shop me. Bit old for me, but not bad.’ I could sense his eyes opening in the dark. ‘And that’s how you do it.’
‘I know the weight of the alloy,’ I said. ‘Two florins and five shillings and sixpence should weigh approximately one and nine-tenths of an ounce.’
‘You didn’t have to look?’
I said that I liked to trust people, which I do. Lying there, I seemed to float outside my body and look down at us both. The objective viewpoint. I could see him laughing into the pillow, his eyes going right through the wall into the ivy and the street.
PART TWO
LETTERS AND DREAMS
When